Published on : 30/01/2021 – 09:24
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The album “The Hunting Accident”, by the Americans Landis Blair and David Carlson, on Friday won the Fauve d’Or at the Angoulême International Comics Festival during an edition organized behind closed doors due to the Covid-19.
It is behind closed doors that the Angoulême International Comics Festival unveiled its annual prize list on Friday, January 29. The big winners were Americans Landis Blair and David Carlson, who won the Fauve d’Or for best album with “The Hunting Accident”, a long graphic novel about Chicago from the last century.
The jury delivered its verdict five months before a general public edition of the festival postponed until the summer [du 24 au 27 juin] and threatened with boycott by disgruntled authors.
The special jury prize was awarded to Briton Steven Appleby for “Dragman”, a superheroine behind which hides a father. That of the high school students devoted “Peau d’homme”, by Hubert and Zanzim, already crowned with multiple other awards in comics, while the revelation prize went to Maurane Mazars for “Tanz!”.
The latter was among the few winners present. “It’s pretty scary to know that you’re going into a precarious job […]. It is hard for us, authors, in this flourishing market, but where the authors are impoverished more and more “, she said.
Difficult context
We will have to wait for the general public edition of the Festival, scheduled for the end of June, for the most prestigious award of the Festival, the Grand Prix, given to a comic book author for his entire career.
The 48e Festival had to change its format and postpone its general public component to the end of June, to “adapt to the context of the pandemic”. It could be held entirely outdoors if the health crisis still prevents indoor gatherings, which seems likely.
The initiative to exhibit comic books in SNCF stations has annoyed the Auteurs et autrices en action (AAA) collective, which is claiming a larger share of comic book sales for authors. He deplored that the Festival and the SNCF “refuse again this year even to remunerate the authors and authors whose work they exhibit”.
Boycott of the authors
A forum was signed by nearly 700 authors, some of whom were in the official selection, or even received awards, such as Zanzim and Maurane Mazars. They threaten a “total boycott of the public side of the Angoulême Festival, next June, if no real and concrete act is taken by then, in the area of our professional status, our representation and ‘a fair rebalancing of the book chain “.
Among comic book authors, “50% of us live below the poverty line. I am one of those authors. We try to hold on, but at one point, we let go,” Gabrielle Piquet launched. daring with “La Mécanique du sage”.
The management replied, in an open letter, that in order to allow these exhibitions, the Festival had been forced “to invest, to commit budgets that it does not have; in a word, to go into debt. [faute de recettes]”.
Comics are not suffering from the erosion of sales, since they experienced a new year of growth in 2020, according to the GfK institute, but from very low remuneration for authors, except for the best known.
With AFP
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